Shimmies and Shouts for a Genre’s Revival

Sharon Jones Headlines Daptone’s Night of Soul

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Daptone Super Soul Revue

Daptone Super Soul Revue

CreditKarsten Moran for The New York Times

“Right now it’s time for me to shout!” Sharon Jones announced on Thursday night at the Apollo Theater. Ms. Jones had already kicked off her silvery high heels, and her band, the Dap-Kings, had revved up a full-speed soul-gospel stomp modeled on the Ike and Tina Turner Revue. She cantered in place, like a runner warming up, then moved into a high-speed shimmy before bounding all around the stage while loosing rough, raspy shouts to ride the groove. At the peak she suddenly called out, “Wait a minute!” The band halted, holding a tremolo chord, and Ms. Jones started to preach.

It was a vintage, sizzling soul performance delivered from soul music’s most celebrated stage. Ms. Jones was headlining the Daptone Super Soul Revue, joining other acts on the Daptone Records roster for a three-night stand at the Apollo. Daptone is a bastion of soul revivalism; its cutoff date for acceptable sounds is somewhere around 1979. The show was mostly an unabashed period piece: an uninterrupted three hours with remarkably well-oiled transitions between sizable bands. Fans could buy LPs and 45-r.p.m. singles in the lobby, and a guitarist in the Dap-Kings, Binky Griptite, broke character only long enough to call for “police departments that are not so happy to kill people.”

The lineup also included the soul belter Charles Bradley and his band the Extraordinaires; Naomi Shelton and the Gospel Queens; the Sugarman 3, an instrumental group whose members are also in the Dap-Kings’s horn section, and Saun and Starr, a duo who also sing backup with the Dap-Kings. The lineup’s outlier was Antibalas, a New York band that plays Afrobeat, the Nigerian funk that Fela Anikulapo Kuti introduced in the late 1960s.

Antibalas played the night’s most exploratory set. Its Afrobeat has been infused with New York City propulsion and diversity. It ratchets up Fela’s deliberate pace and sometimes exults in the dissonance of its churning, brawling funk. Amayo, its songwriter and lead singer — in face paint and a flashy red-white-and-blue outfit — sang about “dirty money,” unity and respect for women, while the band’s instrumental buildups were a galvanizing message on their own.

The rest of the program held both the pleasures and pitfalls of revivalism. It can be easier to reproduce a style than to come up with songs that stand up to memories of hits. Mr. Bradley, who had a long career as a James Brown tribute act, has a redoubtable soul scream and, at 66, many of Mr. Brown’s moves: the quick stepping, the twirls, the microphone-stand tricks and the hip swivels. His songs are more mixed; they often borrow too clearly from Mr. Brown, Otis Redding or Motown. Behind the moves that had the audience roaring, there’s often a bleak side to Mr. Bradley’s songs. He opened his set with the bluesy “Heartaches and Pain,” about waking up to police sirens and learning his brother was dead, fully justifying that scream.

Ms. Shelton also has a striking voice, cutting through the harmonies of her three Gospel Queens. It’s a brusque, percussive rasp, and it was as full of conviction when she was praising God as it was when she sang lines like, “Ain’t no stranger to desperate times.”

Ms. Jones’s songs hark back to the middle and late 1960s of Mr. Brown, Stax and Motown; her finale was a hyperactive demonstration of dance moves from 1965. Many of her songs take neatly turned, rightful vengeance on unworthy men — “I got better things to do,” she sang, “than remember you” — as she carries them from moan to snarl to airborne high notes. But Ms. Jones, 58, lives in the present, too. When she preached, she recalled being at the nadir of cancer treatment, bald and sore and weak. She took a photograph and posted it to Facebook, where fans rallied behind her with replies like, “We love you bald!” Ms. Jones said. It was a 21st-century story in classic guise.

A version of this review appears in print on December 6, 2014, on Page C7 of the New York edition with the headline: Shimmies and Shouts for a Genre’s Revival. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe